


This Is Where I Leave You

by thesoldat



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Tragedy, Best Friends, Brother Feels, Brotp, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Comfort/Angst, F/M, Feels, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt Bucky Barnes, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I'm Going to Hell, Loss, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Oh My God, Other, Ouch, POV Natasha Romanov, POV Steve Rogers, Pain, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Post-Loss, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve, Protective Steve Rogers, Regret, Steve Feels, Steve Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, Time Travel, Tragedy, What Have I Done, What Was I Thinking?, Why Did I Write This?, not much comfort, too much hurt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:51:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesoldat/pseuds/thesoldat
Summary: "Time travel is messy, and when he wakes, he awakes to himself standing right by a cliff’s edge, snow sloshing beneath his booted feet. The Austrian Alps, a zip-line strung from start to end, locked in place — he remembers this. He finds himself in old clothes, amongst old friends, and the only thing that reminds him of the present is the strap around his left hand."The team works with Scott Lang to time travel through the quantum realm, in the aftermath of the cosmic snap. But time travel is messy, and some of the team are displaced in a memory they still can't move forward from. So the struggle begins: If it's something within your reach that you can make right, no matter the cost, will you do it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, time travel. This headcannon was based off of the leaked set photos and fan theories for Avengers 4, and will be Steve (first) & Natasha-centric, due to their respective relationships with Bucky. Would've made it a series, but then it would've felt rather disjointed between both travel sequences. Be prepared, there is a lot of hurt, and not a lot of comfort. Enjoy!
> 
> _“There are no happy endings._  
>  _Endings are the saddest part,_  
>  _So just give me a happy middle_  
>  _And a very happy start.”_
> 
> _–Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic_

Time travel is messy, and when he wakes, he awakes to himself standing right by a cliff’s edge, snow sloshing beneath his booted feet. The Austrian Alps, a zip-line strung from start to end, locked in place — he remembers this. He finds himself in old clothes, amongst old friends, and the only thing that reminds him of the present is the strap around his left hand.

Out of all days to return to, he’s returned to this fateful day. Steve can feel his stomach seize up — it leaves him feeling so empty, and yet also oddly constipated with a cold stone sitting in the pit of his abdomen, weighing him down and constricting his breaths.

Maybe it’s the adverse effects of time travel, or maybe he’s just overcome with fear of what’s about to come, but his stomach is unsettled and he’s two seconds from throwing up.

“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?” The voice pipes up from beside him, in his left ear.

To his left, a youthful, pre-tragedy Bucky Barnes stands tall and steady in his military manner, matching up to him on the cliff’s edge. Bucky still sports the same old pouf — a 40’s staple, if he had to give it a name — and a navy coat buttoned crisply across his chest.

Steve realizes how far the man has fallen after the fall. His shoulder-length hair is, at best, a well-organized mess that looks best in a half-bun. His clothes are always crumpled, stained with perspiration from countless restless, nightmarish nights. The Bucky now, the Bucky that’s also gone, is not nearly as put together as compared to his old self.

In this instance, it’s evident. He never really did realize this, until now.

The words leave his lips without thinking, like a record on playback. “Yeah, and I threw up?”

Bucky hides a smug smirk, pressing his lips together into a tight line. He stares down at the train tracks. “This isn’t payback, is it?”

“Now, why would I do that?"

Again, the words leave him like he’s running on auto-pilot, and it takes a minute before he realizes that everything is playing out exactly how it had been in the past. It hits him as a memory, first, until he remembers that this is time travel. He’s passing through a very real, very existent moment in time.

This is the very moment, just bare minutes before the fateful incident, that everything had gone absolutely, immensely, truly wrong.

When it truly hits him, and the realization sets in in full, Steve panics. He turns to his best friend, only to have his best friend spare a glance right back. His ocean-blue eyes, not the least bit dulled down by the ominous nature of what was to come, light up like a warm bulb to complement the slight grin he returns to Steve.

Disregarding any second thought, he pulls Bucky aside and closer to the enclosure of snow-capped trees, a slight distance away from the rest of the team. He tugs on Bucky’s arm, and Bucky trails right along behind him, no questions asked.

“On second thought, maybe you should stay up here, Buck,” the Captain starts.

Bucky pulls a face, as if reacting to a sour joke. “Hah, not a chance.”

“You’re a sniper, so that means you see better from a distance, right? We could use someone from up here, from afar,” Steve persists.

“More than half the boys’ll be staying up here as overwatch. If anything, they’ll pick up a gun and start shooting, if they have to.”

“They don’t have your aim.”

“And they don’t have your back better than I do, especially when you have knack for making stupid split-second decisions,” Bucky argues, amused. “Why’d you think I’d follow you anywhere, other than to keep you alive?”

“I’m being serious, Buck. You’re better off up here.”

The soldier claps him on the shoulder, a wide grin still stretched across his face. “I am too. I’m not going anywhere, bud. Not a chance. You’d take all the stupid with you, and you know I can’t let that happen.”

“Please, just- I need you to trust me. Stay up here. I need you to stay up here. Don’t go down there. I’ll take someone else.”

“What’s the worst that could happen down there?”

“I don’t want you down there,” Steve snaps, a little less than friendly. But maybe a-little-less-than-friendly is what it’ll take for his best friend to finally listen to what he’s trying to say.

“Woah, there. What’s going on with you today? What’s up?” Bucky pulls away, his blue eyes peering into his face, as if searching for answers. “Talk to me, Stevie. Is everything alright?”

No, everything is absolutely  _not_  alright. Steveis abouttwo impulsive decisions away from breaking the sacred rule of time travel and spilling his guts all over.

“I-“

_No, Bucky. If you go down there, you’re gonna die._

_Not at all, Buck. You’re gonna get blown off the fucking train if you go down there._

_Listen to me, Buck. If you go down there, you’re going to fall from the train and lose an arm, and be brainwashed into HYDRA’s very own weapon._

_Do you want to be tortured for over seventy years? Do you, really? ‘Cos that’s what’s gonna happen if you even think of going down there._

_I know what’s going to happen if you head down there, Bucky. I just can’t sit around and let it happen. They’re going to take you apart and break you, and you’ll be stuck._

_I can’t lose you, Buck. Not again. Not like this._

All these thoughts running through his headspace, and threatening to reveal themselves. Steve nearly gives one up when he notices a familiar figure in the background, coming from behind the trees. A modern figure. A tether to the real world.

As the figure stumbles out of the shadows from beneath the trees, he realizes that it’s Natasha. Up on a mountain she probably has never been on, in a moment in time well before she even existed, Steve is confused on how she had ended up here in the first place, in his timeline, in his sequence with Bucky.

But it’s clear, she’s been there for awhile now. Hadn’t anyone noticed her there?

“Don’t say it, Steve,” Natasha warns. “Remember what Lang said. We’re just passing through.”

“How are you here?”

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head, possibly just as confused as he is. “Lang said that we’d be displaced if we weren’t careful, if we were too attached to a place in time. All I know is that we’re supposed to end up in New York, 2012. We’re way off course.”

“But this is  _my_  memory. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Beats me,” Natasha shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe I’m here to keep you on track, like an anchor. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work. Time travel’s messy.”

The captain’s eyes shift from the blonde to Bucky, still searching his face for answers he wasn’t getting. Concern is evident in his features by now.

He redirects his gaze back at Natasha. “This is where it happens, Nat. It’s where he’s gonna fall.”

The russian’s hardened features seem to falter at his words, softening by a fraction. She glances to the landscape behind him, the Austrian Alps in the background and the icy ravine at the very bottom of it all. She eyes the tracks below, and the steam-fueled locomotive that’s beginning to inch out into the long stretch of tracks before them.

“So, this is where it starts,” she says. Her voice is uneasy, and the words come as barely a squeak. Steve nods, and she nods in acknowledgement as well. “You need to let him do this, Steve.”

“I can’t. Not when I know what’s gonna happen.”

“And what’s gonna happen, will happen. Steve, you can’t change the timeline, not this one. It’s too far back. The ripples into the future will be catastrophic. Please, just think about this for a second.”

As much as he hates to admit it, Natasha isn’t wrong. “But I can’t let this happen to him, Nat. They’re going to tear him apart.”

“I know.”

“I can’t do this. If I do this, it’s as good as handing him over to those bastards. I can’t,” he shakes his head, just as much as his own hands are shaking.

“I know-“

Steve is nearing his limit. “You keep saying that you ‘know’, but you  _don’t_  know,” he retorts.

_“I know,”_ Natasha corrects, repeating herself. There’s something about the way she says it that strikes a chord within him. For some unbeknownst reason, the weight of her words somehow urge him to listen, to not contest this any further.

She continues. “It’s going to hurt, and it’ll hurt like hell, but you have to do this. You have to let it go.”

“I don’t know if I can, Nat.”

“You have to. If he doesn’t fall today, there might not be a Bucky for you to save in the present. You need to remember that.”

He can almost feel an odd heat begin to burn behind both his eyes. Both eyes start to get slick with moisture. He can’t really breathe right, and all of a sudden, in that very moment, he finds himself as a reflection of that small, scrawny kid from Brooklyn again.

“What if I can’t do it?”

“You can. I know you’ll do what you have to,” Natasha offers up a watery smile. “And I’ll be right with you, every step of the way.”

Steve looks to his hands, hands that won’t be able to save his best friend from the unfortunate fall that’s to come. From the seventy years of pain that present-day Bucky still can’t sleep through. From soft, pelting raindrops each resounding like a hailing gunshot to his ears. From empty eyes and perpetually trembling hands and watery smiles that slip right past him, and the twenty different ways that he can somehow concoct just to say:  _I don’t know if I’m worth all this_.

Then he looks to Bucky, who’s brushing a hand over his shoulder by now.

“Stevie, what’re you lookin’ at?” Bucky questions. He turns his own head to the spot where Steve had been conversing with the blonde.

“Um...”

Natasha is closing the distance between herself, and the pair of them. In open air, the captain finds it hard to wrap his head around how he can be in two existences at once, and she can’t. Because Bucky sees right through her, as if she were a ghost.

She shrugs her shoulders once more. It’s as if he can already hear the words in her voice:  _time travel’s messy_.

His best friend then turns back around to watch him, with concern still eminent in his manner.“Did you see something? What’s going on with you?”

“What?” Steve is flustered.

“You spaced out a little, back there. You were about to say something, and then...” The brunette soldier gives him a once over. “You sure you’re alright there, bud? You’re a little off.”

The blonde is shoulder-to-shoulder with Bucky by now, eyes observing the man’s side profile intently. She watches as his jaw tightens up, then slackens, as his ocean-blues scan Steve’s own features for what seemed like a long minute.

She then looks over his broad shoulder again, down to the tracks. “There’s not much time left, Steve,” she starts, just as Monty gives them the go-ahead in the background. He can hear the Schnellzug wail on the tracks. She spares one last glance at the soldier. “We have to go.”

Steve can feel the panic rising, along with the anger. The empty, heavy feeling in his stomach grows even heavier as before, more so when Bucky’s eyes catch sight of the incoming train as well.

“I...” He struggles to find the words. “I-it’s nothing. Train’s coming.”

“It is,” Bucky even beams. “You ready to give them hell?”

He’s all suited up and ready to kick some HYDRA ass. He doesn’t know what’s coming. Little does Bucky really know that he’s running head first into a fight that’ll last decades, a fight that will carry on even long after he finds himself incapacitated.

Steve can’t do this. He just can’t. He knows deep down inside that this moment will stay with him for the rest of his life.

“Yeah,” he has to lie, and his insides feel rotten.

He takes one last look at Bucky, and then another one at Natasha who’s just half-there like a temporal shadow. She nods reassuringly, but he doesn’t feel any more reassured than before.

Steve finally turns, and walks up to the zip line. He shakes the tremors from his gloved hands and places the first hand on the trolley handle. He sees the Schnellzug approaching the drop zone.

When he says it, he doesn’t quite know who he’s addressing it to, Bucky or Natasha: “Stay close.”

And then Dernier gives him the go-ahead, and he makes the first drop. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Just like he had been paralyzed in shock the first time around, now he’s paralyzed just the same. Except, it’s not shock holding his bones in place this time around. This time, it’s fear. Fear of what he knows is about to happen. He wants to get up, but his body doesn’t catch up quite as quickly to his mind."
> 
> The team works with Scott Lang to time travel through the quantum realm, in the aftermath of the cosmic snap. But time travel is messy, and some of the team are displaced in a memory they still can't move forward from. So the struggle begins: If it's something within your reach that you can make right, no matter the cost, will you do it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"If only you could see,_   
>  _The pain you're causing me._   
>  _I feel it in my blood,_   
>  _It's burning me."_
> 
> _\- On Our Knees, Konoba_

Everything that comes after is historically accurate, which at least means that he hasn’t fucked up the timeline yet. But Steve knows that the worst is yet to come.  
   
“I had him on the ropes,” Bucky huffs, almost itching to pop another few rounds into the fallen guard.  
   
He takes a moment to catch a breath of his own. “I know you did.”  
   
Soon enough, he can feel it coming. It hits his senses first as a low, rumbling sound, then growing louder like a plasma jet powering up. He feels it in his throat, an odd lump that makes it a little harder to breathe, just as much as he can see the light sheen of blue soon coloring the smoke that first hid their assailant.  
   
The assailant holds the tesseract-powered assault rifle up, locked on and aimed straight for the pair, just like old times.  
   
Like second instinct, Steve swiftly pulls his friend behind to safety behind him, and Bucky stumbles into place.  
   
“Get down!” He yells, and Bucky follows.  
   
He holds his shield up just as soon as a blast is jettisoned from the assailant’s contraption, the blue light launching itself into the shield and knocking them both back with its sheer force. The shield is forced out of his hand as he gets thrown to the side, leaving him winded after having taken the brunt of it.  
   
At the same time, the diverted blast blows a hole through the side of the heavily armored vessel. He can feel the cold and familiar snap of arctic wind graze his skin. It’s about to happen.  
   
Steve tries but fails to flip himself over from his fallen position on the floor, catching a glimpse of an out-of-place Natasha as soon as he looks up. He’s in search of Bucky, but he finds her instead, ducking herself in a corner and out of reach from the jet’s blow. It’s through her line of sight, one that he follows, that his glances fall back on his best friend.  
   
The soldier is grappling for the shield now. His shield.  
   
_No_ , Steve thinks to himself.  
   
Bucky draws his handgun as well, the vibranium shield held tight in one hand and his chambered gun in the other.  
   
_No, no, no no no no no no no,_ Steve doesn’t want to look. But he can’t find it in himself look away.  
   
Just like he had been paralyzed in shock the first time around, now he’s paralyzed just the same. Except, it’s not shock holding his bones in place this time around. This time, it’s fear. Fear of what he knows is about to happen. He wants to get up, but his body doesn’t catch up quite as quickly to his mind.  
   
The assault rifle begins to power up again, the blue liquid energy brightening up and launching yet another blast in the direction of Bucky. It bounces off the shield, and Bucky can’t hold onto it as he gets thrown off his feet.  
   
The captain sees his body flying into the debris of the gaping hole of the carriage, and Natasha flinches at the sound his body makes as it crumples and ricochets off the surface. Before the HYDRA assailant can power up for a third time, Steve manages to pull himself to his feet and grab his fallen shield in one fell swoop, launching it straight into the assailant’s chest.  
   
“Bucky!” He can’t help but yell out as he pulls off his mask. His voice is loud and hoarse, and no match to the rigorous gusts of wind that’s drowning his voice out.  
   
Sparing no second thought, Steve climbs out onto the outer side of the vessel, gloved hands wrapped around bare steel bars. His hands try their hardest to hold himself into place against the force of the wind, with the train’s speed at full throttle sparing him no extra favors at that.  
   
He watches Bucky, with just two hands on the steel bars that are keeping him from falling, try to maneuver himself closer to the carriage, closer to him.  
   
“Hang on,” Steve yells out again.  
   
He’s hanging on by his hands and his feet, doing the same and doing his best to close the distance. He closes in much further than the last time. He’s confident he can grab Bucky before he falls.  
   
His eyes dart to the steel bar that Bucky is on, watching it loosen bit by bit. He reaches for him. “Grab my hand!”  
   
“Steve,” Natasha starts with a warning tone. She’s holding herself steady by the metal shelves in the carriage, right by the hole in the wall. “Steve, don’t do this.”  
   
“I can save him, Nat,” he pleads.  
   
His gloved fingers barely scrape Bucky’s right wrist. The first time he swings himself over to grab Bucky’s arm, it’s a miss. Bucky tries to inch closer, stilling when the steel bar he’s on begins to creak at the shift of his weight towards a loose side.  
   
And then, the steel bar drops, just by a fraction. His heart almost skips two beats, and for a moment, he sees white.  
   
“This is where it has to happen.” Natasha’s voice is assertive as she dishes out the reminder.  
   
She repeats it again, but her warning falls on deaf ears as he tries to reach for his best friend’s hand, swinging his left arm over a second time. This time, he’s successful. His grip is tight on Bucky’s forearm, grappling for him just as the steel bar gives way.  
   
The sudden additional weight on the steel bar he’s on causes it to loosen as well. The bar begins to whine, dropping by a fraction. With just his left arm, he tries to lift Bucky up high enough, for Bucky to be able to catch his own footing on the grooves in the debris.  
   
He can feel his glove loosening, and then, the steel bar dropping a second time. He knows that this bar is about to give way as well.  
   
Natasha’s eyes are on the whining steel bar, widening with panic. “It’s gonna go, Steve. If you don’t let go, you’re going to fall too.”  
   
He knows. He knows that too. He knows that the next drop the bar takes is going to take both him and Bucky down with it too.  
   
But his best friend is grappling frantically for help, to pull himself up. Bucky’s grip on his left wrist is beginning to slip, pulling his glove down with him, and he can feel Bucky struggling to get his left arm into a firmer hold as well. But his legs are dangling freely below him, and Steve knows that both of Bucky’s arms are getting tired.  
   
The Russian sighs, doing her best to lean over to place a firm hand on his shoulder. Her hold on him isn’t unlike a vice grip, reminding him that this is the past and grounding him to the present.  
   
“If we get to New York, we can bring them back. You’ll get him back,” she reasons.  
   
“I won’t,” he argues.  
   
Because the Bucky he can save this very second is the Bucky he knows. The one before HYDRA. The one before the fall, before the torture, before the metal prosthetic. The one who has followed him right into the jaws of death so many times before, always itching for the next fight. The one who’s a sucker for art, and literature, and poetry.  
   
The one who’s happy.  
The one who’s healthy.  
The one who tells jokes.  
The one who sleeps at night.  
   
The one who isn’t a ghost. Who is neither a ghost in his head, nor a ghost of his former self.  
   
The Bucky he’ll get back from the Decimation, as much as he hates to admit it, is a shell. Like a shell casing from a bullet that’s been used. A discarded remnant of something that used to be lethal. The cataclysmic aftermath of something, or rather someone, that is nothing more than a weapon that’s been made use of one too many times, to a fault.  
   
The Bucky that just isn’t... Bucky.  
   
“Steve?” He hears the fear in Bucky’s voice, accompanied with a sudden stillness, because he stops writhing below him.  
   
It’s as if the gravity of the situation has finally hit the soldier. Somehow, seventy years before, he still manages to sound just like he had before he’d disintegrated as a result of the cosmic snap.  
   
“Steve, you need to let him go,” says Natasha.  
   
He doesn’t want to. But Steve knows that he really has to. And just before the bar gives way, and just before he may as well follow his best friend down to the icy ravine of a frozen-over Danube, he presses both his eyes tightly shut as he does.  
   
The screams all still sound the same, even when they’re seventy years apart. It’s exactly as he remembers it, except this time, it leaves him feeling so much worse. Even someone as versed with death and destruction, and as apathetic as Natasha has to look away.  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Preview of the next chapter:  
>   
>  _“They’d already begun tearing his mind to shreds long before he got on that train, Steve. Long before the fall,” she continues. “I know you think you could’ve saved him, saved him from having his mind tossed in a blender if you’d kept him from falling, but the truth is that it wouldn’t have made a difference.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Preview of the next chapter:  
>    
>  _“This is where it has to happen.” Natasha’s voice is assertive as she dishes out the reminder._
> 
> _She repeats it again, but her warning falls on deaf ears as he tries to reach for his best friend’s hand, swinging his left arm over a second time. This time, he’s successful. His grip is tight on Bucky’s forearm, grappling for him just as the steel bar gives way._


End file.
